Used across the world in both homes and businesses, a large number printer cartridges are depleted and disposed of every day. In an attempt to decrease costs and in the interests of making the industry more environmentally friendly, an increasing number of businesses reuse printer cartridges to the best of their ability. In fact, many will pay for shipping in order to encourage customers to recycle empty cartridges instead of simply throwing them away. Not only does this allow manufacturers to reclaim much of the material originally used for construction of the printer cartridge, the printer cartridge itself can even be taken apart, refilled, and resold. This reduces the price for consumers as material costs are spread across reused iterations of the printer cartridge. Unfortunately, as many printer manufacturers obtain the majority of the profits from the sale of expendables (e.g. ink) rather than the printers themselves, there is little incentive for manufacturers to make cartridge reuse easy for others.
One obstacle in the reuse of printer cartridges is that the printer cartridge pin is difficult and time-consuming to access. The removal of cartridge pins is required to take apart the printer cartridge. Unfortunately, said cartridge pins are often obstructed by a welded plastic piece that is added by the original equipment manufacturer. In order to access the cartridge pin the welded plastic piece must be cut away without damaging the cartridge pin or its corresponding hole in the process. This makes tools such as drills less appealing as any mistakes can result in damage to the printer cartridge or cartridge pin, rendering them unsuitable for reuse; this is because damages result in defects of the reused printer cartridge, a common result of which is banding on printed pages.
To avoid such defects a knife, chisel, or similar tool can be used to cut away the welded plastic piece and expose the cartridge pin. While this method is much less likely to damage the printer cartridge or cartridge pin, it is also much more time consuming. Additionally, both methods of removal are non-repeatable, further reducing efficiency as more time is needed to prepare each individual printer cartridge for treatment.
Therefore it is an object of the present invention to provide an apparatus for extracting embedded pins from printer cartridges in a seamless and efficient manner. The present invention is adaptable to different types of printer cartridges through the provision of cartridge-specific inserts. A pneumatic system drills into the welded plastic in a manner that exposes the embedded pins without causing damage to the embedded pins or the printer cartridges. Once exposed, the embedded pins are then removed by the present invention, wherein the printer cartridge itself is ready for disassembly and reassembly.